Triggers & Automations - We want your feedback!

Hi Tommy (Anatolii Binkovskyi) & Patrick - Thanks so much for your input! 

Tommy - a few followup questions:

For comments, so you are thinking of using this almost as a tooltip for agents? How about the public comments, what is you desired use there?

Do you mind expanding on what you are trying to copy over from a user? Would having access to a related user's field assist in your use case, or do you truly need to copy it into a ticket field? 

Patrick - we are currently working on expanding the operators available in trigger conditions to have parity between similar data types. I captured the need for a 'contains all of the following' to identify a set of tags as well. This is an ongoing effort for the team after we get through the data expansion effort we are currently tackling, so hopefully more to come on that soon! 

I remembered two more things we are currently missing dearly.
- the ability to add internal/public comments with a trigger. we use a lot of tips for agents, different reminders on how to behave with specific users, channels etc
- the ability to use placeholders when setting the value to text fields. we have a lot of custom information in user and often need copying it to ticket

for both of these cases we use API and webhooks which is not an ideal solution, to say the least 

Do you use triggers or automations more? Why? 

Triggers. The UI for automations is old and outdated, not fun to use and automations are more limited. The uncertain/fuzzy nature of when exactly they run is also a little annoying. As time sensitive automations can run up to 59 minutes after the set time. We mainly use automations to control the closing of tickets, as well as initiate an automatic de-escalation when a specific priority-based amount of time has passed.

How often do you make changes to your triggers? 

Anytime we need to add a new agent. We have a complicated system that automatically escalates and de-escalates tickets based on the group and user the ticket is assigned to. This is built on a custom ticket field, which when changed then directs a series of triggers to escalate or de-escalate the ticket.

What is your most used condition in triggers?  

TAGS: "Contains at least one of the Following"

Do you find yourself repeating this condition in multiple triggers due to product limitations? 

YES! We desperately need a "Contains all of the Following" option. Many of our triggers look for a combination of multiple tags. Since I cannot specify a bunch of tags at a time, like I can with the "Contains none of the following" option, I am forced to use multiple tag conditionals anytime I want to look for multiple tags.

What is your most used trigger action?

Add/Remove Tags are by far my most used Action. 

Do you find yourself repeating this action in multiple triggers due to product limitations

YES. Close to half our triggers exist just to act as And/Or logic groups. IF we could get the ability to group conditionals within triggers, it would simplify things immensely.


What would be REALLY nice would be the ability to pull/transfer data from a follow-up ticket. We have a series of triggers that currently use tags to assign follow-up tickets back to the same Agent that the ticket was assigned to when it got closed. Many of our customers contact us months in advance, as there is a lot of lead time involved in our products. Often months will pass before they communicate with us again, usually when the event date is a few weeks away.

If there was an "Assign to Previous Agent" action exclusively for newly created follow-up tickets I would be very happy.

Also, I am gonna go create a feature request for a Tag Manager UI. We really could use a better way to get an big picture view of what tags are present on tickets (open, solved, closed) as well as the ability to dictate special rules for them.

Regarding triggers I often find myself creating a lot of similar triggers like:
If Field1 = A then set Field2 A1

If Field1 = B then set Field2 B1

If Field1 = C then set Field2 C1

Would be much more convenient to set it all in one trigger. Liquid markup would be PERFECT, as mentioned before. 

Bailey Whitaker-Lea

Thank you for the reply. We currently have 1400 triggers and 10 times fewer automations, but managing automations is 10 times more difficult :) 

The main issue is filtering of course, the absence of. 

But, maybe you can at least provide one fix that shouldn't take that many resources to implement? 
Right now, all the fields in conditions and actions are in some random order. If they would be sorted in alphabetical order, it would be a huge huge help. We have around 300 ticket fields and sometimes finding the needed field takes a lot of time. I hope you could understand the frustration and at least provide with this small fix as full UI overhaul is not on the roadmap at the moment. 

Hi Tommy (Anatolii Binkovskyi) 

Thanks for providing your feedback! I've captured this in our product feedback tool. 

I hear your frustrations and upgrading the automations UI is certainly being discussed to see where we can fit on our roadmap. For 2023, the team is focused on expanding the data available in triggers. Once we have more firm plans in place for Automations, we will certainly share. 

Thanks! 

When we can expect automations UI update? They are dated, terrible, frustrating and eat a lot of administrators' time. 

Making it the same as in triggers would be a huge step. We have a lot of automations and custom fields and it is almost impossible to manage already. 

Hi Stephen Wouter Wolff Lan Margosis Anne-Flore Caire

Thanks so much for providing such detailed feedback! 

Some of the items you all mentioned are on our current roadmap, like expanding the data and operators available in triggers, finding ways to create more flexible conditional logic and how to better track changes and errors for triggers, so that is great to hear we are on the right track! 

I'll work on parsing out the rest of your feedback to the PMs owning those areas to make sure it gets captured. 

If you haven't already, please do fill out the survey linked. 

Hi,

One topic I forgot to mention in previous post was Side Conversations - particularly related to Child Tickets. At the moment, this feature does not feel as powerful as it could be.

It would really enhance the parent-child relationship on tickets, if we could post / sync updates between parent / child tickets.

For example, having the ability to post a comment to a parent ticket when a child ticket is Solved, with some placeholders about when the request was resolved, etc. This would enhance visibility, but also allow for a parent ticket to act as a full audit trail on the events associated with it. 

In addition, being able to utilise the options to copy followers / copy fields in Trigger creation for Side Conversations would help. Going a layer deeper, having the ability to select individual fields to copy from a parent ticket to child would add even more power.

At the moment, I am achieving this via webhooks.

Hi,

Great to see feedback being taken on this topic - see answers below:

• Do you use triggers or automations more? Why? 
  Triggers - we use them primarily because they run on ticket creation / update, as opposed to being time based.
  
  
• How often do you make changes to your triggers? 
  Once a Trigger is created, we rarely make modifications to them (providing they are working as intended). However, when developing new workflows / temporary workflows, these can updated and maintained frequently.
  
  At the moment, we are reworking our entire workflow in Zendesk and with that brings many updates to Triggers.
  
  
• What is your most used condition in triggers?  
  Ticket is Created / Updated and checking if a field = value.
  
  
• Do you find yourself repeating this condition in multiple triggers due to product limitations? 
  Yes - very frequently. A lack of conditionality on Triggers means, that Ticket is Created / Updated requests are repeated a lot.
  
  In addition, due to the lack of field changed or field changed to value conditions for custom fields, I have a bunch of repeat Triggers just checking if a field = value, but does != another value.
  
  In general, this results in having lots of Triggers to manage.
  
  
• What is your most used trigger action? 
  Setting Forms / Setting Priority / Setting fields and possibly sending notifications via email / Slack.
  
  I have found more and more we are relying on calling webhooks is something we need to utilise.
  
  
• Do you find yourself repeating this action in multiple triggers due to product limitations? 
  Yes - for the same reasons as the question about Trigger limitations.

Some other general feedback, I would like to add:

• Automations UI - this is way behind the rest of Zendesk. Creating Automations is slow and cumbersome compared to the Trigger UI. In addition managing Automations is frustrating.
  
  The UI feels way out of place compared to most of the other elements of the Admin Centre (Dynamic Content not withstanding).
  
  
• Audit Trail for Automations / Triggers - as an Admin, I would like to have a clear place to see every ticket an Automation / Trigger has run in from the Admin Centre. This is necessary for troubleshooting issues and ensuring workflows have run successfully.
  
  From this thread, I have learned there is an ancient looking method of seeing where a Trigger has run (which while ugly as sin) is really helpful. Modernising this functionality and bringing it to Automations would be fantastic.
  
  
• Conditional Logic - this is a major missing feature and results in having many duplicated Triggers. The ability to do IF / ELIF / ELSE would make Triggers / Automations far more powerful.
  
  
• Detect changes on Custom Fields - having this as a condition would be excellent. Field changed to / from and Field changed.
  
  Combined with conditional logic this would improve my overall Admin experience.
• Add / Remove CCs - being able to cc end-users on tickets via Triggers / Automations would be great.
  
  
• Group assignment on Follow-up Tickets - when a follow-up is opened, the group is empty. Preserving this value from the original ticket would be massively helpful.
  
  
• Ability to use Liquid Markup in Text Fields - Liquid Markup is so useful in Triggers, but there have been times where I want to add a value to a number field ({{ field_name | plus: 2 }}) - this basically isn't possible without using a webhook to update the ticket (something which is not officially supported by Zendesk). Being able to access that value and use Liquid Markup to update it would add so much functionality to these fields.
  
  String based filters such as appending / formatting would be another example of where I would like to use these values.
  
  
• Triggers on Suspended Tickets - a special category of triggers for suspended tickets would make the experience of managing suspended tickets way better. The Shredder app shows the type of functionality that I would like to see.
  
  
• Parsing / Regex to detect incoming Subjects / Description content - this is a big ask, but would be a nice to have. We have scenarios where customers will contact us via email with a formatted mail - being able to directly pull content from those mails and set fields based on content would be great. For example - Severity = P1, set Severity field to P1 - System Outage.
  
  
• Orchaestration - this is the biggest ask I would have. Being able to wait for a result from a Trigger / Automation operation to complete and follow it with another condition / action would bring Triggers / Automations in line with the best in class business automation tools I have seen.
  
  In particular, sending a webhook and being able to wait for the response to take some action based on that value would be great. Not having to rely on ZIS and the need for some development skills would be a game changer.

Other than that (and likely tying into my final point), having the ability to report or see real stats on Trigger / Automation usage would be great - including where a Trigger / Automation failed, webhook failures (and error codes), etc.

My general feeling is that Triggers / Automations were powerful about 5 / 6 years ago. Since then I have seen the power of Hubspot Operations Hub (even the inbuilt workflow builder in Hubspot without the operations hub is fantastic) and Jira Automations (I cannot believe I am praising JIra...) really show the capabilities of other tools on the market, especially considering they allow for orchaestration of events using an easy to use building interface.

Triggers / Automations are average at best in their current state and poor at worst.